David Seidel, Deputy Education Director at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), discusses how the Curiosity rover can bring space into the classroom and how it teaches students to explore using the principles of STEM education.

David Seidel

David Seidel is Deputy Education Director at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Manager of STEM Elementary & Secondary Education. He is also a formal education advisor to the NASA Mars Public Engagement Team. He has been at JPL for over twenty years and, prior to joining NASA, taught science at Beverly Hills High School and ran its planetarium.

He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Geography from Cal State, Northridge and a Masters of Science degree in science education fromUSC. David has received numerous group and individual achievement awards including the prestigious NASA Exceptional Service Medal. He has served as JPL’s lead NASA TV commentator and has also flown on NASA’s “Weightless Wonder” aircraft, otherwise known as the Vomit Comet.

He is currently a contributor to the California review of the NGSS and to the Superintendent’s State STEM Task Force.

Chris: So youre in for another treat if you enjoyed this mornings keynotepresentation. We have another dynamite presentation coming up with DavidSeidel. David is the deputy education director at NASAs Jet PropulsionLaboratory. Youve heard him referenced or the work that they are doingreferenced at least several times this morning. So youre now going to get tohear directly from him, from the birds eye view of what hes been seeing anddoing over the last well, more than few weeks. But the last few weeks has beenan amazing crescendo to the work that they are doing at NASA JPL. David is aformer Education Advisor to the NASA Mars Public Engagement Team. Hes been atJPL for over 20 years and prior to joining NASA taught science at Beverly HillsHigh School and ran its planetarium. He earned a bachelors of art degree ingeography from Cal State Northridge, so another CSU graduate, and a masters ofscience degree in science education from USC. David has received numerous groupand individual achievement awards including the prestigious NASA ExceptionalService Medal. He served as JPLs lead NASA TV commentator and has also flown onNASAs Weightless Wonder Aircraft, otherwise known as the Vomit Comet. (Audiencelaughs). So hes also a contributor to the California Review of the NationalNextGeneration Science Standards and also has participated on Tom Torlaksons andSTEM task force along with myself. So Im really pleased and excited to welcomehim to the stage and to take it away. (Audience claps).David Seidel: Oh, thanks Chris. We could save valuable time if you wouldveshortened that introduction a little bit. And I wanted to say that the reasonwe have two term limits is a 102 years is just way too long. And even if thatwas her first election, that what you voted but (audience laughs). Okay Ivenever given a half an hour presentation and a half an hour before so well seehow this goes. Let me call one person here, my counterpart from NASAs DrydenFligh Research Center. Russ Billings, stand up so more than I can see you.(Audience claps).So as hopefully, youre aware theres three NASA facilities in the state ofCalifornia. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory up in the foothills above the RoseBowl, the Dryden Flight Research Center up at Edwards Air Force Base and alsothe Ames Research Center up in San Francisco Bay Area. So you should think ofthese as a several billion dollars of cash infusion to the Southern Californiaand Central and Northern California economies. And its a part of your of taxdollar that actually returns on the investment through spin-offs and thingslike that. I want to thank Chris for sandwiching me between Doctor Mitra andKareem Abdul-Jabbar. Thanks a lot I will (audience laughs) appreciate that. Ireally enjoyed the presentation. Doctor Mitra where are you? Where he went? Hewent that way? Okay, well he never address where the 25% of the homing pigeonswent that are not around which means that out there as we speak, there areflocks of feral pigeons doing who knows what. (Audience laughs).Okay, its a little more to the point though, JPL and the rest of NASAs, wellwere fundamentally learning organizations. So theyre built around the notion ofcuriosity and wanting to know more about the natural environment, learn aboutit. And when you come to a place like JPL, you may have been hired for yourfirst job but that was just your first job. When that ends, youre going to beasked to do something else for which you have little or no training orpreparation. So it kind of goes back to the computer on the wall I guess herewhere its like you figure it out and make the most of your opportunities. Andso the most of successful JPLers are the project managers where everybody inmanagement, both above and below, is working to their success because those arethe missions. Thats what we do. So where those famous robotic exploration atthe solar system but we also do deep space exploration and Earth. So about halfof the missions that JPL flies is Earth, climate change, looking at the entireEarth system. And so when you hear about things like Iceland, Greenland losingice, the answer to that if you look, well, how is that known? That probably hasa spacecraft to thank for that and a series of other complementaryobservations.So in the case of Dryden and Ames Aeronautics Research as well, theres been abig debate about who killed the Human Space Flight program, Obama or Bush? Theanswer is neither one. We still have a Human Space Flight program for everyday,for the last 13 or 14 years, is between one and three Americans living andworking in space. And right now, the commander of the International SpaceStation is an American woman. So nobody killed the program (giggles). So goingto what Tom and Chris both mentioned about, Endeavour of saying, Endeavour flyaround and seeing the drag through LA that last an extra day which was kind ofspectacular. Theres a lot of things that are going on there in the news. We hadthat, we had Curiosity, we had is I think it was at theChris mentioned that itsSkydive yesterday. All cool stuff. One of the root things for the Skydiveone ofthe advisors is Doctor Clark whose wife Laurel died on the Columbia accident.And the whole issue of high altitude ejection was it was the science of thesuit that Felix Baumgartner wore. So the ejections capability that the shuttleused to have was level flight at low altitude. Thats not where they have theproblem. So theres a lot of stand thats tied into that. But its not just that.Weve got dark energy. Weve got exoplanets, other stars. Its the stuff that youdont hear so much about or the kind of ballistic arc of news in Science. Sosomething happens, its in the news and theyre nowhere to go. (Audience laughs).So the nice thing about the Endeavour is its the gift thats going to keep ongiving because thats going to be on display. In the case of the Mars rover,same thing, because JPL stands are just plain lucky and our missions go on andon and on, and on and so (audience laughs). So its a 2-year mission but isgoing to go on considerably longer than that though.Alright, Im not a deep thinker. I had a good idea once but it died ofloneliness (audience laughs) but I do know more about Mars and the rover thanmost people. So I should mention out that today is Sol 68. Theres an app forthis, you can and Ill tell you where to go get it. And I wanted to point alsothat my presentation almost is entirely stuff you can build yourself. Now, whenyour [inaudible] says uploaded the presentation on to this CSL website and Imgoing to give her another document which is kind of my standard. Heres what youshould know about NASA and JPL education. So Ill put that up there as aresource. Weve got a lot of stuff out there and youve to do a little digitalarcheology to find it and find what is right for you in your educationalenvironment but Ill add that to the resources there for you. But Ive liftedstoneI mean liberated most of my slides from this sitephotojournal.jpl.nasa.gov. This is where all the good images go. And one of thethings I have linked is we had a slash new to this and its whatever weve doneon the last 7 days; Mars, the Asteroid Vesta, Earth system science, ozone,whatever it might be. The last seven image releases are up on that site. Andthe reason why I mentioned that when do I post my presentation is that you donthave to write these down or if you download the presentation. The presentationonline is much better that this one. I actually had to trim a lot of stuff outof it and I shifted everything up for on the screen a little bit. So Iencourage you to download my presentation like I said its much better than thisone, the one Im actually giving.This image right here is from the other rover. So we still have a workingrover. We have two working rovers now but the Opportunity rover that landedalmost 8 years ago is still operating. So its all 3,102. It was designed tooperate for 90 so that means were 3012 soles past the warranty in terms of Marsdays. So, just plain lucky I guess. But theres a lotThis is an image on thelast couple of weeks. So theres new science. We found a new type ofblueberries. Theyre called newberries now of different process that created theones what we thought we understood before. So theres a lot of sciences goingon. So just real quickly, just looks like Arizona (audience laughs).Alright, this is a chart that I included mostly so you could download it anduse it later but let me just highlight a couple of things. Mars is earthlike insome respects. So the day is 24 hours and 40 minutes long. The flight team isactually on Mars time so it sounds great like you can sleep an extra 40 minutesevery morning. In fact, its like moving most of the time zone to the West eachday and it starts to accumulate and drag on you. So about 3 months is about aslong as you really can go effectively. But Martian dates, you know not amiserable if you think of it in terms of the day. Also the axial tilt on Marsis almost the same as Earth. So 23 degrees versus 25 degrees so that meansthat the seasons are the same as the seasons we have here except than in thepast, Mars axial tilt or obliquity has changed very dramatically and ourshasnt. And thats probably important why were here and not there. Theres alsosome dramatic differences though. The gravity on Mars about 38% of what weexperience here. The year is almost 2-Earth years long so the Curiosity missionis designed for one full Martian year almost 2-Earth years. And then heres thenasty stuff, so the temperature, the average mean temperature on Mars is -81Fahrenheit. The atmospheric pressure is similar to what Felix Baumgartner hadto deal with yesterday, about 7 millibars versus 1,013 which is normal sealevel which is where we are here in San Diego, I know this. And less sunlightabout 43% as much sunlight. And then the real nasty bit the fact the atmosphereis 95% CO2. So when you see the pictures that especially from Opportunity, whenyou look out on the landscape, the cameras on Opportunity are about the sameheight as us. So its really the view that youre going to get but you better bewearing your spacesuit. So its a dangerous environment in lots of respects. Andone of our challenges is to learn more about it.So this is the new home of Curiosity. It landed a crater thats about a hundredmiles across called Gale crater. Its named for an Australian amateur astronomerwhich is appropriate because Mount Sharp in the center, if you turn the picturearound and look from above it, it kind of looks like Australia so works out.Little hard to see but theres in a black ellipse there which is the 99%assurance landing ellipse. And the little green line is our track where wegoing to climb the foothills of Mount Sharp. And we actually didnt land rightin the center. We landed a little bit long but well within that ellipse. Andwere in a very nice piece of real estate there. But Mount Sharp shows clays atthe bottom basically evidence of basalted rock that was soaking wet for a longperiod of time and then sulfate, its another hydrated mineral, its a little bithigher up. Above that is layer after layer after layer of dust. So we dont haveto climb this mountain. So over the course of the prime mission and of coursetheyve got plans to extend the mission. Were going to climb up some boxedcanyons and sample as we go and analyze as we go.The first rovers, were looking for the history of water on Mars so its Followthe Water. And we have some relative but not absolute numbers in terms ofwater. The big question is how much water for how long? How long itd go?Because that features back into life. So these are wet environments. Thepurpose for Curiosity, of course it has no purpose of its own, its our purposeprojected unto it. Its we cant go so we send machines. This is a surrogate forrepresenting human beings because its not coming back, is to look forhabitability. Regions of Mars that actually were habitable in the pastpotentially by our conventional standards. And its not a biological set ofexperiments but we do have the ability to do some biological analysis butbasically were looking for habitability.So my presentation is not the story of the Curiosity rover, thats been told.Its too hard to do in half an hour. So Ive got some sort of amusing tidbitelements to it I guess. This is showing our landing ellipse there in the centerof that NSL landing ellipse. And it settles the Mars Science Laboratory whosename is Curiosity. And its a very small ellipse, theres a small footprint. Andthe other ellipses are previous missions and all the way to the outermost onewhich is Viking. So basically theres a circle 300 km x 300 km. across, you gota 99% chance youre going to land somewhere in that. Well that doesnt do you anygood if youre going to be doing a moon base or Mars base where you needprecision landing. You need all your parts to go to the same place at the sametime. You cant be 80 miles off to one side or another. And the landing ellipsefor Curiosity allowed us to go into this crater to the base of the foothills.No previous lander would have allowed us to do that. Theres plenty of terraineven for the last lander we have which was Phoenix few years back which wouldbe unacceptable as a landing site. So weve come a long way and this is anelevation map from a previous orbiter, Laser Altimeter where blues are low andreds and whites are high.Something else to you need to worry about. This is from an orbitingspacecraft. Theres two US and one European spacecraft at Mars. So if you do theMath, theres five operating spacecraft at Mars. Theres objects in orbit orflying around, eight several planetary objects right now between United Statesand European Space Agency. And theres something like 60 operating spacecraft inspace right now from NASAs Science Mission Director and the Earth Science folksright now. So nobody killed the space program, believe me.This is actually a picture of a dust storm taken, that was some concern, thathad grown and move towards where the landing site was. It could have beenissue. Not that we could have done anything about it. Once weve launched thespacecraft, we were committed to arrival pretty much precise time. Thisspectacular image where a dust storm looks like from the time and some highaltitude cirrus clouds below called water ice clouds and then some craters andthings like that. And the landscapes are the kinds of things we need to worryabout.So this is the family of Mars rover. So Curiosity on the right weighsessentially a ton and is a size of a car. And the cameras are considerablyhigher than the Mars Science Exploration rovers. So in the center, Spirit andOpportunity, the Mars Exploration rovers in 2004. And on the left, the firstrover which was Sojourner who went on board Mars Pathfinder 1997 is basicallythe size of a laser printer. So weve gone from this to the moving vanessentially for carrying it around. And also, you can see that the roversincrease not only in size but also in capability. So rather than call out allof the instruments on board the rover let me just say, its got 17 cameras onboard. So this is a mission designed to be photogenic.So how did it get its name? Well, student competittion. In fact, weve done anumber of these. So some missions are named who knows what, some where have youknow have numbers and descriptions, others are named after famous deadastronomers. This one actually is a student contest and Clara Ma who was asixth grader at the time. Space missions take a while to evolve so now, shesgoing in hershes a sophomore in high school. But she named it and the idea thatCuriosity is an eternal flame that burns in everyones mind makes me get out ofbed in the morning and wonder what surprises life will throw at me at that day.Thats pretty much good description of most JPLers. (Audience laughs). Dont getme wrong. We work for a large government bureaucracy but every once in a whilewe land on Mars. (Audience laughs). Okay this is a frame of a movie of the heatshield falling away from the rover which has a camera in the front left cornerthats pointing straight down. Now right now, its only about 2 feet off theground but thefrom the top of the atmosphere and the heat shield separation, wehave a high def movie going all the way down to the surface. Somebodyinterpollated it to make a full 30 frames a second, its on Youtube. This is aphotograph taken at the heat shield right after it fell away. And it turns inthe movie, you not only see the heat shield going away because out of the fieldof view but we actually have some frames of it hitting the surface and a littlepuff of dust, big puff of dust actually I should say if you were standingthere.This is an image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. We actually were ableto do this when Phoenix was coming in for landers. They thought theyd tryagain. This is the orbiting spacecraft with the best camera ever flown toanother planet tilted sideways so the camera would point at the parachute andthe descent stage going down. So this is actually Curiosity on the way downduring the so called Seven Minutes of Terror. And this is the really terriblepart for the other components that where in the rover. So the upper left is theback shell with a parachute attached. Something I didnt mention is that JPL isoperated not as a civil service center but as a federally funded research anddevelopment center on the contract of Caltech. So if you know anything aboutCaltech, the colors of the parachute might mean something to you. So its orangeand white just that have to be some color, right? Okay, and the picture on theright is the descent stage which was the so-called Sky Crane which lowered itdown to the surface. And the Sky Crane is the same size as the rover basicallyalthough not anymore. So heres the impact and there are no large piecesanymore. When the rover landed, it did an automatic sequence through the dustcovers. Just take a couple of quick pictures and send it back just so we knewwe landed. Although theres a chance we wouldnt have getgotten those picturesand turns out one of those actually captured the dust plume from the impact. Sothere you go. Pretty nifty picture here sorry itsyou should download it. Itlooks much better downloaded. Another reason to download it too is in thecomment section on the Powerpoint, I list the URL to the photo journal image.So if you like that image, download the presentation and just follow URL andyou could have it yourself.This is a self-portrait where the cameras can take a picture of the rest ofthe rover pretty much everything except the camera mast itself. But one of theinstruments we have is at the end of the arm which actually can take picturesof the rover. So this is a self-portrait with the edge of the crater off in adistance there. As you can see, we didnt want to land there so didnt have to.And heres kind ofthis is enhanced forits sort of white balance, put some handsfor contrast and some other thing. This is looking across the landscape at thefoothills of Mount Shar and this is where were going to be going. So you cansee that layering in there and theres these discontinuities where the landscapechanges in terms of composition but we do some pretty spectacular images.This is an enhanced Mars Reconnaissance Oribiter image. Again, from orbitlooking down, you can see where the jets for the descent stage actuallydisrupted the soil a little bit. And then heres our track where were rocketingacross the surface. So its taken us couple of months to go a few hundredmeters. So this is a marathon, not a sprint. The shuttle moved faster yesterdaythan it did. Then, those this rover goes. So I was thinking boy you know ifthere was a race, who would lose. (Audiene laughs)Something else about this site too is the landing site is kind of a sort ofsmooth rolling landscape of some craters on it. And then if you go to lowerright hand corner, lots of impact craters. And if youre on the upper rightcorner, this is a brighter dust free high thermal inertia environmetnt. So wereheaded for this sort of triple point where the three different types of terrainall come together. Not our primary objective for the mission but hey, were overhere, lets have a look.Something else too, I brought a prop that wasnt anything about having[inaudible]. Chris didnt say I could but he didnt say I couldnt either. So(audience laughs) this is actually a spare rover wheel. The reason why I knowits spare it has got a property tag. This has got serial number 007. You wantto guess what the other six are? (Audience laughs). And it says spare so itsokay that I have this. Its basically milled out of a billet of aluminum. Andthen the hubs and the flexure systems are titanium inside. And it turns out, inorder to be able to shed particles out from the wheels, they dont get caught inthere, theres some holes in here and wouldnt you know if the whole patterndoesnt stamp out JPL in morse code everywhere we go. (Audience laughs). Itsalso a wheel odometry measures. So as we drive and we look back at the drivethe previous day, we can count the number of imprints and we can compare thewheel odometry to the accelerometer, see if theres a bending slippage or slide[inaudible] like that. It was going to say JPL at one time but we didnt want toantagonize our NASA sponsors too much. So there you go.Besides being kind of cool and it fit in my car. The marwe have an inflatableMars rover too thats not quite as dramatic. When you think about this and therover, these images here represent millions of correctly-made decisions bycreative thoughtful people, well-trained that thinking out of the box for whichthere was no right answer, at least no single right answer, plenty of wronganswers. So the kind of creativity and thoughtfulness that goes into this kindof process is something that I feel as an educator were trying to cultivate inour kids. Not just that it will come to JPL or Dryden or Ames and working inthe state on important issues of exploration or national need, but becausetheyre going to have to vote on the rest of the items on the ballot, thingslike genetically-engineered food labels and so on that have a science andtechnology focused to them. And theyre either going to pursue scientific habitsof mind or theyre going to vote the last commercial they saw. So its a largercompared to this org as Im concerned and just simply coming to work in STEMfeels once they graduate I think Jeffersonian democracy requires that we havelived a technologically and scientifically literate at some level population.Right, this is a picture of the arm camera. So at the end of the arm is calledthe Mars Hand Lens Imager. Basically, it can be put down right next to rocksbut it has got infinite focus as well. And its the kind of pinkish disc and hassort of a semi-circular dust cover. Its looking kind of straight at the camera.To the right are some brushes and then the most of the drillmost of the arm isactually impact hammer kind of what you can get at Home Depot except ours workson Mars. And so were going to pick up soil and hammer into rocks and then doanalysis with some very sophisticated on board laboratories. Weve got x-rayrefraction. Weve got gas to chromatograph mass spectrometry and alpha particlex-ray spectroscopy on the rover plus the cameras. Anything walks up to therover, well get a picture of it. (Audience laughs).Okay, just a recent scientific discovery here. This is looks like what the[inaudible] do to the sidewalk. So weve got these layers that are pride up andon closer inspection, thats Mars on the left and Earth on the right. Weve gotabout 1-cm cobbles here. We basically have driven across the streambed, anancient streambed. So, the rocks were jagged when they got their start but theywere eroded by flowing downhill and being bounced along and rounded out. So ofcourse, still back to the absolute questions of how long ago and for how long.But we know were in the right place, this area was warm and wet at one time.Okay, heres the part thats good for you as an educator. This URL here, itsalso in the program mars.jpl.nasa.gov/participate. We step out of here and goto that webpage real quick if I can. Okay, so first of all, how do I know whattime it is on Mars? Well, theres little counter here. So its the 69th day onMars, its 8:35 in the morning at the Curiosity landing site. But thisParticipate site is a way to connect to the instruction materials but also tofind all the fun stuff. So when I say theres an app for that, thats literallytrue. Theres an Iphone applications. Theres also Be a Martian where you couldfollow along with the mission but you can also help made a tag Opportunityrover images. So theres an image and you take a look at it and you tag what yousee, dust devils, craters, rocks, clouds, rocks, rocks, dust, rocks (audiencelaughs). You can participate that way. Theres some augmented reality tags onboard where youll be able to point your Iphone at an image in front of therover on your webpage and youll get additional information and data from that,information about Curiosity itself, Martian diaries are blogs basically fromscientists and engineers involved in the project. Something interesting, theresa Codus Mars experience coming soon. Microsoft shares our concern. This will bethe software. Students are not programming. They have apps that are ready togo. Outside of Iphone apps, theyre not in the programming and so Codus, a wayof getting students interest and excited about programming. Spacecraft 3D, youdownload a target basically which is actually a test image from the Mars HandLens Imager. You print that out and then you have an image on your Iphone andyou hold it over there, you can basically maneuver it around. You got a 3Dmaneuverable image of Mars rovers and some bunch of other spacecraft. Weve gotMars for Students and Mars for Educators, just instructional materials,posters, curriculum and so on. And basically your link to it is off of thisParticipate webpage.Okay, so my deep thought here for education. Ive only got one here. Its notthat deep but its an observation. So, just a reflection on space exploration ingeneral. So I like this image which has been around for quite a while withinJPL. So on the left or lower part, theres a Mars Surveyor down there and itssort of 1950 spacesuit as you might imagine and an image of the canal is onMars and [inaudible] what are they like. And in the upper right hand corner,that image then goes to a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image which basically aweather satellite image of Mars and more contemporary astronauts.So how do we get from point A to point B? So, my unresearched thought of themoment here is that teachers have grown up in a recent environment that isor apost-Watergate and post-Apollo environment. So lets characterize by two things,one is nostalgia, the other one is cynicism. So every president wants to beKennedy. Well Kennedy wasnt even Kennedy if you go back and look at it. Butevery president has made a bold statement about space, none of which wefollowed. So, you cant do that anymore and theres a very good essay that NASAsformer historian, Roger Launius wrote about thealong with the death of theimperial presidency was the ability to dream great things regarding spaceexploration. So nice try but its not going to work exactly. So its the cynicismabout the space program.So another one is its very difficult to integrate scientific discovery intothe classrom. So current events pop up periodically, if youre a big fan of ourwebpage is you learn about stuff. Theres no specific mechanism for being ableto incorporate that into the curriculum. In fact, this probably going to pushsomething else out of the way or aside, which is a challenge. Its not a newchallenge but [inaudible]. English language, Arts and Math are important buttheyre not simply skills so Im not going to dump on English language, Arts andMath. We actually took the approach for schools that where the environmentwhere thewe know what the test scores are. Dont let me catch you teachingScience or Social Studies or the Arts or anything else, saying okay, if youregoing to teach English language, Arts, lets learn about something and develop acurriculum package called Reading, Writing and Rings. It was done by one of ourguys in our office. The Cassini Saturn Orbiter mission, that they are writingproject and some others. Thats English language arts piece for grades 1, 2.Theres another module for grades 3, 4 which means they have remedial use forquite a bit longer. And itsall standards are English, language, Arts but theyrelearning about Cassini, you know learning about Saturn. Theres a good pre andpost in there as we took that approach. Weve also gone in the past into some ofthe standardized instruction materials for English language, Arts and foundthat there was a thing on Galileo in open quarter some place else, took a lookat it and went oh my God, this isnt about Galileo at all. So, it mentions hisname but theres no science in here, theres no context or anyting else. And soour approachwhat sort of hit me there was that what the students have, theyrelearning to read as a process skill but they are not learning to read forpleasure. Their reading is essentially about nothing. You read the assignment,its not something that you found or that you were interested in. Its kind ofthe opposite of what Doctor Mitra was talking about. Its the students finding,its delivered to them. So theyre reading about nothing so theyre not readingfor pleasure. And if theyre not reading for pleasure, then theyre not readingscience fiction.So where did all those JPLers come from? It depends on how old you are. So itseither the Colliers article that Wernher von Braun wrote with Willy Ley andArthur C. Clarke in the 1950s or it was 2001 a Space Odyssey or it was StarWars or it was some other kind of that. Theyre going and say see people rootingfor their particular inspirational moment. (Audience laughs). So what is ittoday? So it wasnt just a matter of seeing the movie 2001, it was reading thebook. It was reading Ray Bradbury. It was reading all these people who havethis essentially futuristic view. So at the end of the day, students, myselfand so the rest of the room I guess, were asked to expand our horizons, be onthe horizon. So many of us that are working on the space program view rovers onMars, people on Mars, colonies on Mars and beyond has an in ability that itsgoing to take a while. You know theres going to be hardship on the way but itsnot a question of when. I mean it is a question of when, its not a question ofif, its definitely question of when. But its not a question of when, what isanother question of? (Audience laughs). What I mean to say is were going.(Audience laughs). Okay now, whether we live to see it or not, its sort ofbeside the point. Humanity, our sons only got another 4 and a half, 5 billionyears left, I mean so there you go, theres your imperative.So theres a generation that believes that we belong out exploring space. Is itthis current generation? Are they getting the inspiration that they need? Itsseeing the shuttle drag to the streets of Los Angeles adequate if theyre notreceiving anyif theyre not out there reading Ray Bradbury or you know thisscience fiction personally other choice. Just to reinforce that, ChesleyBonestell, turns out he was working with the best science of the time, whichwas fuzzy things to telescope eyepieces, got pretty much right there in termsof the hills, the dust and everything else. And heres different types of spacevehicles exploring Mars. Our students thinking in that kind of term, in thatkind of context. Ill just throw this one out here to just as a highlight herefrom the movie The Angry Red Planet.Video: Oh hes alive.David Seidel: One of the worst science fiction creatures ever created. You wantto be wearing your face plate and your helmet as well. You can see thepuppeteers even lost interest in this. Okay so (audience laughs) enough ofthat. Its an awesome movie. Its a great popcorn movie we used to show duringour teacher workshops after dinner. Alright so this isIm going to close withthis image, I want to show you some really quick although Im posting theschedule here a little bit.This is a picture taken by the Hand Lens Imager. Its a left handed arm by theway. So its got a shoulder attached to the left side of the rover, elbow andwrist and the fingers are all these instruments and tools at the end. Its aview reaching down underneath the rover looking at the bottom of the rover passthrough the wheels with Mount Sharp in the distance. So, this is not only apretty cool picture. Its actually two pictures sandwiched together but this isan artifact manufactured here in California that is sitting on the surface ofan alien world and its just getting started on a mission that very well mighthelp us understand whether theres life abundant in the universe and in oursolar system or whether were really completely alone and this is it.So inspirational, exciting, real jobs, real work here in the State ofCalifornia. I want to make sure that people appreciate that even if they dontchoose to come work on it. And they never was unamazed with the nationallegislature that we even have a space program sometimes considering all thethings that happen. In case you didnt know, the NASA budget is four tenths of acent. So as Neil deGrasse Tyson says if you held up a dollar bill and you cutoff four tenths of a percent off of that, it wouldnt even get you in the ink.So were not exactly an expensive part of the budget but were the part thatactually does return dividends. Let me waive one thing at you and Ill get offthe stage here and Ill have this too if anyone wants to check this out duringthe break, youre more than welcome to do that.One thing that Ive noticed in the Next Generation Science Standard is the termmodel is everywhere in there. Its not a really clear definition of what theymean but there it is. So hopefully, therell be some things that address that.Well, this is a computer simulation that was developed for the Mars Explorationrover, this could be the Mars Science Lander of landing, the entry, descent andlanding. And it can run in real time if you speed it up and theres a lot ofmanipulation you can do to it to change position and orientation. And it hastime advanced in the lower right hand corner, distance, altitude, speed and soon. So let me take us through just real quickly here. Theres a lot you can dowith it. This is a tool called Eyes on the Solar System. So its a cruise ringseparation. So Im going to speed up time considerably and well hit theatmosphere. Okay this is the real right here but you can speed it up here. Thisis where were going. Free to download by the way. Its using a 112% of myprocessor right now in the Mac but you know as long as you keep your computercool, itll work just great.Alright let me get down here tojust some acronyms here. So lets begin Surfer.Surfer means straighten up and fly right. We jettison tungsten masses thatrebalances the spacecraft so see them disappear off here in a moment. Therethey go. We actually have an image that shows their impacts and the next of theline. Heres the parachute deploy and Im running it much faster than the realrate here. So back shell separation coming up in less than a minute. We canzoom in on it. This is a divert maneuver. So the parachute wouldnt land on us.Yeah, this actually run 12 seconds fast when we were using during the missionbut to be updated. And then the Sky Crane fly off and then heres our rover onthe surface. And if you want to know what it looks right now, we have livemodes so. A little bit crooked in terms of my Mac not running fast enough. Butagain, heres a simulation here.This is part of something called Eyes on the Solar System that allows you togo to any planet. You can visit any of our spacecraft and do similar kinds ofmaneuvers with it. So fun toy, again its listed along with the Seven Minutes ofTerror video and some other things and my Powerpoint presentation online. And Ididnt do too badly here. So thank you very much, happy to answer any questionsyou have for me. (Applause)